Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

“sprachgefühl,” a German word we’ve stolen into English that means “a feeling for language.”

“Office chitchat of the sort you’re likely used to,” he grumped, “is not conducive to good lexicography and doesn’t happen.”

You must set aside your own linguistic and lexical prejudices about what makes a word worthy, beautiful, or right, to tell the truth about language. Each word must be given equal treatment, even when you think the word that has come under your consideration is a foul turd that should be flushed from English.

Our last printed unabridged dictionary, Webster’s Third New International, took a staff of almost 100 editors and 202 outside consultants twelve years to write. We began work on its successor in 2010; because of attrition, there are, as of this writing, 25 editors on staff. If we hold to the schedule, the new Unabridged should be finished a few weeks before Christ returns in majesty to judge the quick and the dead.

Blending grammatical systems from two languages on different branches of the Indo-European language tree is a bit like mixing orange juice and milk: you can do it, but it’s going to be nasty.

The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth.

English is a language that invites invention (whether you like it or not), and the glories of the Internet make it possible to spread that invention abroad (whether you like it or not).

A job where you read all day can be a pleasure, to be sure, but it can also ruin you. Words cease to be casual, tossed off, and able to be left alone. You are that toddler on a walk, the one who wants to pick up every bit of detritus and gunk and dead insect and dog crap on the sidewalk, asking, “What’s that, what’s that, what’s that?” while a parent with better things to do tries to haul your over-inquisitive butt away.

People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for.

Etymological fallacy is the worst sort of pedantry: a meaningless personal opinion trying to dress itself up as concern for preserving historical principles. It misses that language change itself is a historical principle: a language that doesn’t change is a dead language, and as much as etymological fallacists seem to love the purity of Latin,*6 you’ll notice that none of them have abandoned that whore English for it.